Socrates Would Not Be Recognized As a Philosopher So Why Should We Recognize Jeff Lowder?

I'm opposed to Jeffery Jay Lowder claiming he's a philosopher, which he does. This is a screenshot of his Twitter profile claiming he's a Philosopher of Religion. He only has a B.A. in Computer Science earned in 1995 from Seattle Pacific University. I have a great deal more qualifications to claim I'm a philosopher, but I don't do so. It's for others to say, and they say that of me once-in-a-while. I rarely even see a real philosopher claim he/she's a philosopher. It's an accolade others bestow on you, and/or given to you by the university you teach at. So Lowder is arrogant to say so. It does not matter what others say or how many of them say it.

One of the responses from his echo-chamber of a blog is to compare Lowder to Socrates. If Socrates was a philosopher without credentials then Lowder can be one too. Lowder even "liked" such comments! *cough* Lowder is someone who, as far as I can tell, never read a paper at a philosophical conference, much less published in a philosophical journal. And he never taught a philosophy class either. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page! ;-) At best he's self-taught, which isn't bad, but there is a big difference between a directed philosophical program taught by experts and being self-taught. It's much worse than this when it comes to Socrates. He not only didn't have any academic credentials, or write anything, he was rejected by the scholars of his day. More than this, if Socrates came to life he wouldn't be able to write a philosophical paper that would pass peer review. If you look at his reasoning--brilliant and original that it was for his day and the reason we hail him as a philosopher--his arguments in Plato's Dialogues are at an introductory college/university level, not the highly technical philosophical level demanded by today's philosophers. In fact, Socrates probably wouldn't even be able to understand most philosophy today. He wouldn't know anything about Oriental philosophy, that's for sure. Nor would he understand a great deal about either the Continental or Analytic traditions in philosophy. He wouldn't be able to understand much of the Philosophy of Religion, since a great deal of it is based on the new religion (to him anyway) of Christianity. And modern discussions of ethics and justice have by-passed his brilliant and original contributions significantly, as they have to his arguments on behalf of immortality and the afterlife. Socrates would have to catch up on the history of philosophy before he could even make a contribution. For surely one cannot understand Immanuel Kant without first understanding David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers, as but just one of many examples. And Socrates didn't know anything about modern science either.

My point is that the era of Socrates is long past. This is a new era with better levels of argumentation by those recognized to be scholars. It's been said that Aristotle was the last person who knew everything that could be known. That day is gone too. We now live in an era of specialization and in this era there are recognized standards requiring credentials along with a certain quality of work. My claim is that Lowder doesn't meet these rigorous standards, and even if he did he should keep silent about it. Otherwise, doing so makes him look bad.

The reason why this matters and that our disagreements are important to be forthcoming.